Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University. Born in Utica, New York, he worked for the United States Information Agency in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, advised the Russian Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1990s, and co-directed a research laboratory at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow from 2011-2022. His books include Building States and Markets After Communism: The Perils of Polarized Democracy and Property Rights and Property Wrongs: How Power, Institutions, and Norms Shape Economic Conflict in Russia. He lives in New York City.
Les Johnson is a physicist whose many books include A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars, Graphene: The Superstrong, Superthin, and Superversatile Material That Will Revolutionize the World; Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel; and The Spacetime War. He serves as principal investigator for NASA’s first interplanetary solar sail space missions, Near-Earth Asteroid Scout and Solar Cruiser, and lives in Madison, Alabama.
Kyle Harper is a professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma. His books include The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton) and From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. He lives in Moore, Oklahoma. Visit Kyle Harper online at kyleharper.net and on twitter @Oklahomaharper.
Mary Beard is one of the world’s leading classicists and cultural commentators. A specialist in Roman history and art, she is professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and the author of bestselling and award-winning books, including SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome and Women and Power: A Manifesto. She has also written and presented many television programs, from Civilisations and Meet the Romans to The Shock of the Nude. She lives in Cambridge, England.
Marc Levinson’s seven books include The Box, a modern classic that explores how a seemingly mundane innovation, the steel shipping container, made globalization possible, and An Extraordinary Time, which examines how the end of the post-war boom around 1973 led to an era of anxiety, uncertainty, and political extremism that is still with us today. He was formerly finance and economics editor of The Economist in London, developed environmental and social investment research for a New York bank and served as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Washington, DC.
Sean B. Carroll is an award-winning scientist, writer, educator and film producer. He is Vice President for Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Balo-Simon Chair of Biology at the University of Maryland. His books include The Serengeti Rules, Brave Genius and Remarkable Creatures, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.